Stormy Daniels, Feminist Hero

For once we’re listening to a woman who refuses to wear either a scarlet letter or a superwoman’s cape.

By Jill Filipovic

Ms. Filipovic is the author of “The H Spot: The feminist Pursuit of Happiness.”

Aug. 24, 2018

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Stormy Daniels signed autographs at an adult entertainment store in West Hollywood, California in May.CreditCreditRobyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Let’s take a moment for Stormy Daniels.

On Tuesday, Michael D. Cohen pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws, charges stemming from payments he made to two women, one of them Ms. Daniels, with whom Donald Trump is said to have had an affair. Mr. Cohen, a former lawyer for Mr. Trump, says he made the payments at the direction of the president, in an effort to influence the 2016 election.

It’s an extraordinary admission, and an extraordinary political moment — not just because of what it means for Mr. Trump. It marks an unanticipated feminist turning point. Ms. Daniels is an adult film star and, like the president, an unapologetic self-promoter. Hers is not a female archetype that has historically garnered much respect, trust or sympathy. Yet here she is, an imperfect, entirely self-possessed woman telling her story with clarity and without shame. And here we are, actually listening to her.

Mr. Trump’s own incompetence, inexperience and misogyny didn’t stop his ascent to the White House; neither could a woman who spent her life cultivating capability, expertise and political pedigree. The usual rules don’t seem to apply to Mr. Trump. And under the usual rules, a woman who so thoroughly breaks norms of female decorum and political propriety would be shamed into silence.

Which is why there is so much power in the fact that Ms. Daniels does not believe her job or her involvement with Mr. Trump or the payoff is her shame to carry. She wants him held accountable, and the justice system is actually stepping in. She is refusing to slink away, despite being paid to do exactly that in a pattern we’ve seen too many times from influential men seeking to maintain their dominance and avoid responsibility.

Ms. Daniels is a sex worker, making her the kind of “bad woman,” scorned for her work, who is not often believed when she indicts a powerful man.

This is what Mr. Trump’s protectors are banking on. Ms. Daniels’ lack of shame about her line of work has led to a right-wing escalation, with conservative media outlets hounding her as a “prostitute” once they realized she would meet “porn star” with a shrug. Rudy Giuliani, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, said in June that although he respects “all human beings,” Ms. Daniels is apparently one exception: “I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career woman, or a woman of substance, or a woman who has great respect for herself as a woman, and as a person,” he said. “And isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation. So, Stormy, you want to bring a case? Let me cross-examine you.”

The threat is that Mr. Giuliani would do to Ms. Daniels what lawyers have done for centuries to imperfect women (and in particular, rape victims): Humiliate them on the witness stand by suggesting their sexual histories render their testimony unreliable and their credibility questionable.

Mr. Giuliani contrasted Ms. Daniels with the three “beautiful women, classy women, women of great substance” who Mr. Trump has married, perfectly encapsulating the profoundly misogynist virgin/whore dichotomy imposed on women, where we can be only perfectly good or entirely bad. A woman who behaved like the thrice-married and affair-prone Mr. Trump — going on the radio to brag about her promiscuity, leaking sordid details about her sex life to the tabloids — would be unlikely to fall in the “virgin” category. But men don’t have to navigate these poles at all.

It would be hard to invent two people who better encompass one of the longest-standing sexist double standards than Ms. Daniels and Mr. Trump. But Ms. Daniels also undercuts liberal impulses to turn her into an oversimplified feminist hero. She is a vastly imperfect person by any standard, at times brave and at times venal, obviously admirable and obviously self-interested. These complications, of course, exist in most human beings. But most human beings could not survive the scrutiny she is under, nor so deftly dodge efforts at simplistic caricature. What’s incredible is to see Ms. Daniels embody so many human extremes — so much boldness, so many flaws, and so many taboos broken — and to see her story nonetheless believed and acted upon.

Mr. Trump has built his image on gold-plated decadence and acts of dominance and degradation; in a sexist society, money and power continue to be the blunt masculine equivalents of the more enigmatic female sex appeal (which itself is largely measured and rewarded by men). There’s little cost to men flaunting their wealth as extravagantly as Mr. Trump has.

But for women, there is a significant cost to advertising sexual availability and expecting dollars be handed directly over. Women who monetize their attractiveness through conventional acting or modeling, like Mr. Trump’s wives, may be seen as less deserving of their resources than a man who was, like Mr. Trump, born rich, but they are generally in the clear. Younger, beautiful women who marry rich men might be princesses (“beautiful women, classy women,” per Mr. Giuliani), trophy wives or gold-diggers (“the calculating woman who refuses to sign the prenuptial agreement because she is expecting to take advantage of the poor, unsuspecting sucker she’s got in her grasp,” as Mr. Trump put it in “Trump: The Art of the Comeback”).

Women who have affairs with married men, whether those women are Ms. Daniels or Mr. Trump’s second wife, are held more culpable as seductresses than the men who, like Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani, actually broke their vows. But it’s women who cross the line from looking sexy for pay to having sex for pay, like Ms. Daniels, who face the most judgment. The men who pay for it, or pay to watch it, are generally unremarkable.

We are far from transcending the pervasive assumption that a woman’s sexual decisions are decisive of her character and her integrity. In many swaths of the country, Ms. Daniels continues to be written off as a pole-dancing Hester Prynne — a woman not to be trusted.

But the country is also watching her dogged refusal to be quiet and her unflagging insistence that she isn’t the one who should be embarrassed. We’re seeing a woman who refuses to wear either a scarlet letter or a superwoman cape, and she stands in sharp contrast to a self-aggrandizing president who may face serious consequences once this all unspools. The potential triumph of a deeply imperfect woman over a powerful man won’t exactly break a glass ceiling. But it could put a little crack in a stereotype just as tough to shatter.